Cryptography Fundamentals: Defining Cryptography

Cryptography Fundamentals: Defining Cryptography

System administrators, database administrators, security professionals, software developers, and anyone who has to work with compliancy or regulations that require data protection.

Prerequisite
None

Expected Duration
92 minutes

Description
Cryptography, and understanding its limits and pitfalls, is essential to protecting data. In this course, you will learn about how cryptography can be used to protect and secure data, different methods that exist to protect or transmit data securely, and the components that need to be understood to ensure data can be protected properly.

Objective

What is Cryptography

start the course

describe and identify the reasons for having and using cryptography

recognize historical uses of cryptography and their relevance to cryptography today

use and identify basic cryptographic terminology

describe why cryptography is difficult to get right and how poor cryptography can give you a false sense of security

identify the different types of cryptography and how cryptographic algorithms can be verified and validated

describe basic export controls and limits that can be imposed on cryptography used around the world

Purpose of Cryptography

describe how cryptography can keep data confidential and within limits

describe why data integrity is an integral part of cryptography

define how cryptography can provide a means to authenticate an entity

describe how cryptography can be used to prove, with high certainty, that an action or statement is associated with an entity

Cryptographic Methods

describe how OTP, or one-time pad, cryptography can theoretically provide perfect secrecy but has some significant limitations

describe and use a substitution cipher and understand the weaknesses that can be exploited by an attacker against these ciphers

describe and identify the features and use cases for symmetric-key cipher algorithms

describe and identify the features and use cases for asymmetric-key cipher algorithms

describe the use of steganography in encryption products to hide the fact data is even encrypted

describe the purpose of cryptographic hash functions and how they can be used in cryptography to provide data integrity

describe a digital signature and how it can be used for authentication and non-repudiation

Building Blocks of Cryptography

recognize the difference between blocks and key sizes as they apply to cipher algorithms

describe and perform padding operations to data for block ciphers

describe how to encode encrypted data for easier storage or transport

describe the purpose of an initialization vector for a cipher algorithm and how nonces can be used to protect small datasets

describe how entropy is used in generating random numbers and how that entropy is critical to the strength of a cryptographic key

describe the creating, or generating, of keys and how the key strength is critical to cryptographic ciphers